Teaching

I have been teaching SerradaEscrima
in the Bay Area since 1985, starting at the School of the White Tiger
in Oakland, where I also studied and taught Kenpo until 1989. From 1989
to 1992 the program became “Serrada of Berkeley” (the SOB’s) but then I
moved a few miles north to El Sobrante and
classes went south into Oakland. Since then I’ve also taught in San
Francisco, Vallejo, Mill Valley, Lafayette, Danville, Pleasant Hill,
Pleasanton
and San Ramon, as well as classes for East Bay Regional Park Police and
members of the San Francisco Sheriff's Department, Berkeley and Oakland
Police, and Highway Patrol. The program was renamed “Bay Area
Serrada
Escrima” (BASE) which also reflects my philosophy of stressing
good solid basics as the foundation for mastering the art.

Class Update: July 2013

After
teaching a weekly class in Pleasant Hill for seven years, including
five at the Gracie Sports Center, I've gone back to only teaching
private and semi-private classes by appointment at my home, clients'
locations or outdoors in parks. If I find another suitable location for
regularly
scheduled classes, this will be updated here.

Private classes are $80 for two hours.
Long term students (who have completed their basic angles) pay
$80/month for regularly scheduled invitational group sessions.

These rates are actually modest compared to most
private instruction in the Bay Area for many arts (music, dance, etc.)
which frequently run $80 for 50 minutes. Most martial art instructors with my qualifications and level of
experience
are charging $120-150/hour or more.

(One of my former students, a national
champion and Olympic
coach in Taekwondo, charged $120/hr for lessons – in 1991!)

You
can contact me directly at (510)222-0332, or by email.(If you call and
leave a message, PLEASE speak
clearly when leaving your phone number!People know their own number by heart and so tend to say
it so quickly
it often is difficult to figure out!)

Registration/Release
Form – For convenience of those who want to fill this out
prior to the
first class, it is here in Word format.

Stickman’s Three Rules for Classes

1)Train Safely.If you hurt your partners unnecessarily,
they won’t work with you.Without
partners to help, you won’t progress in skill.

2)Have Fun.If you don’t enjoy what you do, you won’t
put in time and won’t progress.

3)Practice!Here’s the hard part;if you don’t work on what you are taught,
you won’t progress in skill!

Simple rules, right?Why
make things more complicated than they have to be!

Teaching
Philosophy

(For
those who don’t mind “complicated”)

As
my teaching has continued to evolve, I coined the word SEPAT,
an acronym meaning “Self-Empowerment
Practice And Theory”, pointing towards inner awareness as a key for
learning to
act for oneself.According
to the late Sonny
Umpad, this is also a Tagalog word meaning “wild child”, a
nice synchronicity
that captures the intense flavor of the Filipino martial arts.

Essentially
what this means is that one’s state of mind affects performance, making
our inner
game a significant contributor to overall performance. What we see, feel and think
are entirely subjective,
even as we must face real-world experience.Habits developed early in training affect the course of
subsequent development, so my priority is conveying clear and specific
instruction to steer students on the correct path to self-mastery.
Learning to monitor
one’s own performance
cuts down on habitual errors that are harder to correct later.

Classes
are a form of laboratory, so students are encouraged to question what
they
don’t understand.If
something doesn’t
work, we examine their process so they can determine for themself the
validity
of the concept.

As
a teacher I draw on my experience not only in martial arts but from
hypnotherapy, NLP and an MA in holistic health education.I believe we learn much
faster when we focus
on positive achievement rather than negative results.This synchronizes both our conscious and unconscious
actions and
goals, allowing ourselves to tap deeper into our intuitive nature to
become more
free in thought and action.